Why Dynamic Digital Receipts Mean More Sales for Your Store

We here at FlexReceipts are obviously pretty fond of dynamic digital receipts, in fact, we’d go ahead and tell you we’re totally passionate about them. But why are we so passionate about dynamic digital receipts that we decided to go ahead and make them our whole life? Because dynamic digital receipts mean more sales for your store. It’s as simple as that.

What is it about dynamic digital receipts that allows you to turn a customer’s single purchase into another future purchase? Glad you asked! We’ll share the many uses for digital receipts that will score your store loyal customers and repeat purchases.

1. Capturing customers’ emails leads to a longer life time value.

It costs less to keep a customer than it does to acquire a new one. While sources vary on how much less it costs you, the average seems to be that it costs about 4-6 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep a current customer. That means you want to keep your customers for as long as possible. Email marketing is one of the best possible channels you can use to raise your lifetime customer value. Email marketing can be a very personal channel that allows you to gather a lot of data about a customer and to keep in close contact with them. Additionally, if you’re using a marketing automation provider, you can actually use customer’s emails and data to even personalize your website for them.

So dynamic digital receipts can help you lengthen your life time value by providing an easy and natural way to collect email addresses. It can be a struggle for retailers to collect the email addresses that will help them provide their customers with the best possible communication, and using digital receipts essentially completes eliminates that problem.

2. Use dynamic digital receipts for bounce-back coupons.

Bounce-back coupons have long been a popular method of getting a customer to return to purchase from you, and have been known to be very successful. (This company raised their yearly revenue by $300,000 using bounce-back coupons alone.) But the traditional method of bounce-back coupons – namely, tossing a paper coupon in the bag with the purchase- has a lot of problems:

First and foremost, we are in the digital era. Paper coupons no longer fit into someone’s life. They are easily lost; the customer must remember to bring them into the store; the customer might look at the coupon once and forget all about it.

Given that most sales associates toss the coupon in the bag without alerting the customer to its existence, there’s a good chance your customer may never know the coupon exists.

They’re not exactly the most green, given that you have to print them on paper.

That said, digitizing your bounce-back coupons eliminates all these problems. By putting a bounce-back coupon right into a digital receipt you can ensure that your customer does not lose the coupon, always has it with them in their pocket, and definitely sees it. You can even send follow up emails to remind the customer to use the coupon.

3. You can use dynamic digital receipts to educate your customers about purchases.

Educating your customers is important. The service industry has found that educating customers in whatever service they were getting resulted in the customer trusting the service more. Bitly found that educating customers about the power and features of their product increased their customer retention and engagement. By educating your customers in your products, you teach them how to get their full value out of your product, which helps them trust your brand. This in turn, encourages loyalty and repeat purchases.

As a retailer, your sales people should, of course, be educating your customers on your brand, products and services throughout their stay in your store. However, educating your customers should not end at the door, not least because we all know there are plenty of customers who may say little more to your sales staff than a curt “hello.” Dynamic digital receipts provide a perfect platform to give your customers educational material. You can set your receipts up so that it dynamically serves content based on that specific purchase. Your customer bought a new tent? Their receipt shows a video demonstrating the 5-step set-up. Your customer bought a pair of leather boots? Their receipt provides an infographic on how to care for the leather. (Bonus points if you carry all the care products you use and link out to them.)

Furthermore, using digital receipts ensures that you are able to store purchase information with an email address. This capture allows your email marketers to continue to send educational material to customers over time. For instance, in 6 months, an email marketer could send more information to the leather boots purchaser about why conditioning leather makes your boots last longer (and include a link to a care kit). In 2 years that marketer could also send information on how to do simple boot repairs at home, and potentially include a link to schedule an appointment with the store’s shoe repairers, should you offer that service.

Dynamic digital receipts can also be a major tool in your loyalty program. A problem that many loyalty programs suffer from is the lack of information stores provide on them. A typical experience involves a sales person wrangling a customer into signing up for the program for a discount and never really explaining more than the initial discount. To your sales people, signing people up for the loyalty program is most often seen simply as a tool they can use to encourage a bigger purchase, rather than as a tool your brand uses to increase customer engagement and retention. In the scenario, once the customer provides the required data, no further information is given to them, and they have no idea how to go about finding more if they were so inclined.

Some brands, like Starbucks, have gotten around this problem by creating an app that they run their loyalty program through. Once a customer downloads it, everything they could ever want to know is at their fingertips. But many brands, especially smaller ones, do not have the resources Starbucks has to create a loyalty app. So rather than do that, you can, and should, look to your emailed receipts to provide your customers with information on your loyalty program.

A dynamic digital receipt can display a call to action to a customer who is not yet signed up. The CTA can include information on exactly what your loyalty program provides them with. Once they’re signed up, the receipt can display information on how many points they have, what they can earn, and how much they have to spend in order to reach their next reward.

5. Dynamic digital receipts can provide product recommendations.

I’ve touched on more creative ways of providing product recommendations to customers in digital receipts, but you should not overlook that most obvious way: dynamically generating new recommendations for your customer based on their current purchase. You can easily include a section that offers recommendations of products you have that go with the product they purchased. In the case of the leather boots, you could show that care kit. You could also generate a recommendation section of what people who bought that product also bought. Again, in the case of the leather boots, perhaps you show a different pair of shoes customers frequently bought with the boots.

Conclusion

Dynamic digital receipts are a powerful tool to generate more sales for your store because they increase your customer loyalty and retention, and because you can actually make more direct sales right through them.